Publishing, Product, and People: A Conversation with Josephine Weisflog

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About The Publisherspeak Podcast

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Real stories. Honest reflections. Conversations about leadership, change, and the work that shapes our world.

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Hosted by Sowmya Mahadevan, Chief Orchestrator at Kriyadocs, The Publisherspeak Podcast features interviews with people making meaningful moves—inside and outside the world of scholarly publishing. From academic leaders and publishing professionals to coaches and change-makers, each episode goes beyond job titles to explore personal journeys and the mindsets behind impactful work.

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In this episode

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Host Sowmya sits down with Josephine Weisflog, Senior Product Manager for Author Experience at BMJ Group, for a fascinating conversation about author experience (AX) and how that experience can be improved.

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Josephine and Sowmya talk about the importance of AX and how AI can impact and help enhance it. Josephine brings the lens of product thinking and publishing expertise to this evolving discipline. Whether you’re a researcher, editor, or simply curious about author experience and research dissemination, this one’s for you.

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Dive into the full conversation below or watch the episode here.

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Full conversation

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Sowmya: Hi Josephine. It's lovely to have you on The Publisherspeak Podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today. You know, just before you came on to the podcast, I was looking at your LinkedIn profile and I'm seeing words like research collaborator, assistant editor and you know, I was thinking here I'm talking to a product manager at the BMJ and so, but you have all this background that's so amazing. These are words that I hear in the publishing industry. So, tell me a little bit about how you got into becoming a product manager in a publishing house.

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‍Josephine: Yeah, thank you. I mean, first of all, thanks for having me. I'm very happy to be here. Yeah, I always say I ended up working in scholarly publishing by accident.

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‍Sowmya: You know, that's something I hear from pretty much everybody. Everybody says I came here by accident. So, yeah go ahead.

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Josephine: Yeah, so just before I started working at BMJ Group, which is five years ago now, almost to the day actually, I worked in the cultural and tourism sector and then Covid hit. So, it became clear quite quickly that I should look for another opportunity because no, you know, there wasn't going to be any travel for quite a while.

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And then I got quite lucky because this role came up. I got approached for the role I have now. And I think I got approached because I had this strong background at that point already in product management and a kind of proven track record of applying like a user centric approach to product development. And because BMJ wanted somebody to really look after an entire user or customer group in the form of researchers, it was a really good fit. But I think, yeah, maybe you're right.

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Maybe they also picked up on like some of the things in my past. So, when I was a student still when I was doing my master's, I was working part time at the university and I was working with the institute where I studied, I was working on like a project which was already involving digital elements at the times, was already working on like a digital platform which brought together different actors in terms of institutions, organizations in the tourism sector. So, this was in kind of Northern Italy, Switzerland. But yeah, as I was working at the universities, I have a tiny bit of background from way back working in a kind of research setting at university. And then once I finished my degree, I moved to Germany for a bit and I worked as an assistant editor at a very small journal which is called the Museum's journal, which specifically publishes kind of articles around and about museums and exhibitions in Berlin and the surrounding area.

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So, I have a bit of experience in print publishing as well. And yeah, maybe it's a combination of those things that ultimately meant I ended up here.

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Sowmya: That's wonderful. I mean, you'd never know how your experiences kind of shape you. So, you've been an editor and a research assistant and then coming into that, being a product manager.

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So, let's dive right into it. You're all about author experience. That's what you're leading at BMJ. And like you said, BMJ particularly brought you on board to have to bring that user centric, the author centric approach. And then I know you're very passionate about Where Is My Paper?

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So, talk to us a little bit about what are you doing at BMJ. How are you driving this author experience forward and what are you passionate about?

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Josephine: Yeah, I mean, as you say, I'm very passionate about author experience, which is my role, but it's also something that I really believe is what can sort of set you apart as a publisher. To me, it's a sum of a lot of different parts. Author experience to me kind of means we're attractive as a publisher for researchers who want to really share their work with the world. It also means we give authors the best route to achieve and kind of demonstrate real world impact and also recognition for their work. It also means things like making them feel informed about how to publish with us and stay up to date on the progress of the article through our systems.

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Because you just mentioned Where Is My Paper? And yeah, I think working with medical research, especially at BMJ Group is so interesting because authors are always working doctors who have you look after patients. You know, they don't have a lot of time. Writing and submitting a manuscript isn't kind of their day job. And you know, dealing with a publisher often comes at the end of sometimes years of work on a particular research project and usually also at the end of a long day of doing lots of other things.

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So, while, you know, you won't necessarily always get a publication out of it because being, you know, having your manuscript rejected is a normal part of, of publishing. You still want to have a good experience when you interact with the publisher and you want to have positive interactions and positive communication where you go there and you know that you're going to be able to get the things that you came there for. And yeah, that's kind of, that's what author experience sort of means to me. And yeah, to answer your question, yeah.

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Sowmya: Yeah, I think you did. You know, absolutely. You know the word author experience, that the phrase author experience, the AX, you know, is all terminologies that I'm starting to hear only in the last few years. So that's not something traditionally I feel like publishers have really focused on. But I think it's becoming more and more important for publishers to focus on author experience.

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Are you seeing this trend across the publishing world? What is your take on, okay, how important is it to focus on author experience and is this like new thing that is coming up, how important is it for publishers to be really paying a lot of attention? I know at BMJ you are, because that's why your team that is looking at it. But is that something that globally, for all publishers, is that something that's very important?

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Josephine: I think so, yeah. I mean, I've obviously only been in scholarly publishing for five years, but I've seen it become more and more important over those five years that I've, I've worked in my role for sure. And yeah, I think it is becoming more important because authors have so many options nowadays and they have options outside of traditional scholarly publishing as well to disseminate their work if they want to. And there's only ever going to be more of those. So I think the author experience is, as I said earlier, I think it can really be the thing that sets you apart because if you're having a good experience while you're publishing your work and if you have someone you can trust and who will help you and support you, I think that's really the thing that can make a difference. And I think, yes lots of publishers have obviously realized that and there are lots of roles like mine with other publishers as well.

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I think. Yeah, across the industry it's something that's more and more common. I don't think, and I hope not, it will go away anytime soon.

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Sowmya: Yeah, there is a fine line though, right? Because in my interactions with a lot of publishers, you hear that, true, we want to give the best experience to the authors, but we also want to make sure that we only kind of sort of limit what they can do or what they ask for or, you know, like, because like you mentioned, not all the authors papers are going to be accepted, so some of them may not really have the best experience. Right? So do you actually think that there is a common understanding of what author experience even means and amongst the publishing community and what is it that we are actually striving towards? There is a balance between how much leeway you want to give to the authors and how much transparency or how much do you want to like service, customer service, do you want to give to the authors?

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Josephine: Yeah, I think, I do think there is a common understanding. But as you say, there's always a bit of a balance because obviously most scholarly publishing is for profit, so there's that as well. But also I always see it in the sense that authors or their institutions are mostly the ones who are paying us to publish with us through the APC, which are either, you know, funded by the author's institution or from a funder or through like a read and publish agreement or sometimes even from the author themselves, you know. So, I do think that, that this means that we have to provide good service because people are paying us a lot of money to publish with us.

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Yes, there is a balance that we need to strike in terms of obviously, we can't publish everything just because somebody, you know, pays us for it. That's what would make us kind of a predatory publisher. And I think largely this is well understood in the kind of the entire publishing community and researchers understand that as well. So, I think most researchers do understand that being rejected is a kind of a normal part of getting your work published. And they also understand that there are different reasons for rejections.

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I think what is important though, is sort of how you're being rejected. You know, does it happen quickly, for example, because that means you're still kind of in the mindset of working on this project or this manuscript which you've just submitted. And if you're getting rejected quickly, it means that you can move on quicker with your manuscript to a different publisher. So, for lots of people, even though they're being rejected, that's actually not necessarily a bad experience because it's just, you know, it's just part of it. On the other hand, if you have to wait for a long time, especially for a rejection without a review, that would constitute a negative experience because you've perhaps gotten your hopes up that you're not going to get what we call desk rejected or like rejected without a review. So, if that takes a long time most people understandably find that, that's negative.

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And people are very keen. Authors are keen to receive constructive feedback from reviewers. So, they pay a lot of attention to the quality of the reviews they get because obviously they want to take that and incorporate it into their manuscript to, to make changes when they submitted somewhere else if they've been rejected from a particular journal.

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So, yeah, I think it is largely understood what author experience means and that there are also parts of it that don't equate. Oh, a good author experience means you're always getting published I think, thankfully, that is something that most people understand.

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Sowmya: So, you know, can you talk to us a little bit about what are some of the initiatives you are leading at BMJ and how do you measure whether it has had the impact that you are desiring? I mean, how do you really measure whether the authors are having a better experience or talk to us a little bit about some of the initiatives that you're working on.

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Josephine: Yeah, so there's lots of different things that I'm working on. So, as you know, Where Is My Paper? which is our manuscript tracking tool for authors.

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I'm also leading on research publication, which is like a training product for researchers, teaching them how to become published authors. I look after our author hub, which is kind of a source of information for authors, where they find all of the instructions, all of our policies that they need to get published. And I would say those are kind of three, three main products or platforms that I'm leading on. But I'm also looking into lots of other initiatives that we're exploring from a perspective of is this something that we might want to do in the future in terms of gathering sort of feedback and data and insights? One of the main things that I use is our author satisfaction surveys.

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So, we have author satisfaction surveys at different points in the publishing process. So, authors get sent one after they've submitted a manuscript, they get sent one after they've been rejected, if they are being rejected, and they get one again after publication. We also send a survey to our reviewers after they've completed a review. So, we speak to researchers or, you know, or give them the opportunity to give feedback to us at lots of different stages. And within that, we have an author satisfaction rating that we ask them to give us.

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And along the satisfaction rating, they have space to leave a comment. And I love that kind of comment section. I especially find the most valuable are the critical comments. So, somebody perhaps has a slightly less good experience for whatever reason. The reason they give is a huge kind of treasure trove of insights and of things that we can do better in the future and that we can improve.

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So, that's usually where I look to sort of find out about, okay, what are our most common researcher pain points at the moment? And that's where then we derive opportunities from to see, okay, where can we improve? Where do we need to sort of move the needle? And that's, for example, how Where Is My Paper? our manuscript tracking tool came to be. It's directly from that sort of feedback after I submit my manuscript I don't know what's going on with it, I don't know where it goes.

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And as a result, we built Where Is My Paper? Those are kind of sort of the indicators where we can go and look for problems and opportunities for improvement. Is that sort of feedback? And in terms of actual live products, we do testing all the time.

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So, on Where's my paper? for example, before we launch a new feature, even a small one, we always do user testing before we launch it and before we put it live. So, we'll always test with at least sort of five or six people.

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If you're starting to see like a sort of trend after five to six people, that's usually a good gauge of, oh, is this a good idea? Do we need to do more tweaks? And then, yeah, if you're not seeing a trend yet, you continue your user testing. But sort of that's how we get insights into, you know, how well a live product is doing, in addition to, obviously all of the common things like analytics, you know, user and customer insights that we run on our products anyway. But I'm always very keen to actually speak to researchers and to speak to authors, because you can't.

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There's so much value in qualitative feedback like this, and I think that's really, really important.

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Sowmya: Yeah, I know. I think any user feedback is like gold to a product manager because you know that people are using your product. And I think, like you said, the critical feedback is especially the ones that are really, really valuable. So, you know, we were in that panel discussion at The Publisherspeak Conference in UK last month, and, you know, one of the topics, one of the points that came out in the panel discussion that you were a part of was, do researchers and authors even understand what publishers actually do or what is the value that they are bringing to the whole publishing process?

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And is that even communicated well? And that's part of the author experience. And I heard you talk a little bit about Author Hub and what was that like the training program that you have for publishers? So, what do you think? Do you think authors and researchers understand what publishers actually do? And is there a space there for better communication, more transparency, perhaps?

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Josephine: I think there's always space for better communication and more transparency. Always. I'm always a huge advocate of that. I said we might as well.

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You know, there's no point in being secretive around certain things and certain processes. We might as well People what tell people what we do. I think there is still sometimes a misalignment where it can be sometimes slightly misunderstood the extent of the publisher's role by certain researchers or certain authors, especially perhaps early career researchers might have some of these expectation gaps just because they have a bit less experience, have been less exposed to the process. We also find that with early career researchers, if they're located in a lower middle income country or in a space simply where there's sort of less of a research tradition, they sometimes lack the experience to know how to choose an appropriate journal, for example. So, that's sometimes something that we see or like I said, sort of expectation gaps around what will the publisher actually do from there versus, what is sort of required of me as a researcher and as an author to do as part of the process.

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So, yes, I think there's always more room for us as publishers to do better and to communicate better about our expectations and also communicate in, I often think, more accessible language. I mean, as soon as you kind of start working in publishing, there's hundreds of acronyms that new acronyms that you have to learn, and I suddenly kind of flying at you. And I think there's sometimes a risk that can happen where that sort of language creeps a bit too much into kind of our outward communication to researchers and to our users and to our readers. And I think, yeah, we should really try and simplify and use language that's understandable and accessible to everybody. So, I think that's something that we can do better.

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And yeah, I'm always an advocate for more transparency because I think transparency ultimately fosters trust.

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Sowmya: Absolutely. But what you're saying, no jargons? Come on. So, I think publishing is full of jargons. There's a lot of new things to always talk about, but no podcast is complete without talking about AI. So, let's talk about AI in AX. So, what are your thoughts on how AI could perhaps help improve, enhance author experience? What are you excited about? What are you also worried about with respect to AI and author experience?

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‍Josephine: I'm excited about sort of lots of things where it just makes everybody's lives easier, both for researchers and also for, you know, for us as publishers as well. I think where I'm excited for researchers is that, you know, AI can take care of, you know, a lot of things that are currently quite painstaking. You know, filling in lots of forms is really, really tedious. Especially, like I said earlier, after a really long day, if you're, you know, a medical researcher, and a doctor. And then at the end of the day, you have to fill in several hours worth of forms to get your research published and then also have to pay for it.

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That's not a good experience. And, you know, AI can help with a lot of that and help automate lots of those things. So, I'm really excited about just leveraging AI to be able to provide a better user experience. I'm very excited about, you know, things like conversational interfaces to things. One thing you have to do in order to be compliant with lots of policies, which is obviously important when you're publishing research because you want scientifically sound research, you want to be compliant with all of the rules and regulations.

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But obviously you have to. It's no one's favorite thing to read lots of different policy documents. And that's why I'm excited about conversational interfaces, because you can just interrogate all of those policy documents at once using AI. So, it's things like that. I'm excited for the author, I think for us as a publisher, as with lots of different.

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Same as with lots of other industries as well, AI can help hugely with operational efficiency in lots of different ways. And that ultimately results in a good author experience as well. Well, because it will allow us to do things a bit faster because, you know, we have kind of an AI helper to help us expedite, you know, some of the processes that until now we've had to do completely manually. Now we probably, you know, we'll automate some of them where we can and only do a human check sort of at the end. But, you know, for some processes, the lion's share of the work can be done by AI, which means we'll be getting a lot faster in some of the things we do operationally behind the scenes, which is great news for really everybody who's involved in the ecosystem.

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Things that I'm worried about. I think we got into that a little bit perhaps at the Publisherspeak Conference as well, is sort of around kind of skill degradation. So, I think, you know, there's lots of AI tools now can sort of prevent users from learning quite foundational skills if they're used too often or too early, perhaps in certain career stages. So, I think there could be a bit of a kind of mutual skills erosion, both actually on the researcher side, but also on the publisher side as well. And I think so things like, for example, abstracts, AI can help hugely with cutting an abstract down or writing an abstract and cutting it to 300 words if you have to do all of that yourself without any tools.

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Everybody knows how difficult it is to edit yourself down to a specific amount of words and still capture the essence of all of the work that you've done in your article, which is 10 times as long, but also capture the interest of, you know, whoever's going to read that abstract in the first instance, the editor, but then also, you know, any potential readers.

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And I think having AI help with that is probably fine, but I think it's a real skill that is perhaps at risk of getting lost as well. And in a similar way, from a publisher perspective, there's actually lots of skill involved in lots of the kind of research integrity checks that we do if we do them completely, you know, just manually and just. And just by looking for clues. But there's so much potential in automating it.

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It's also important to understand how I would do a check if I were to do it manually and without an AI, because it tells you a lot about, you know, about the why behind things. And I think because it's completely human to get comfortable with no longer asking the why because it's easy and if something is comfortable, the creatures of comfort. So, we just very easily kind of lean into that. But I think it's sometimes important to ask, why am I cutting these 200 words from the abstract and not these ones? Why is there a research integrity flag on this authority?

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And I think the why is important, and I think generative AI releases us a bit from that responsibility to ask the why sometimes. So, I think what we'll have to do, and I think we can learn it, but I think it's up to us to recognize that and adapt our behavior and use AI responsibly, especially in something like scholarly publishing, where we're publishing medical research. If. If there is something, you know, that's. That we publish, that shouldn't be, there's some real potential consequences to, you know, to people's health and even lives.

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So, I think that's going to be a learning curve for everybody, researchers as well as publishers. Is that responsible use of generative AI as it becomes more and more prominent?

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Sowmya: Yeah, I think that's a very, very important point. Like I've heard people describe, you know, ChatGPT as an intern, but it is only an intern. Like you still have to have that critical thinking.

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So, what if you have never had the opportunity to do the work to develop that critical thinking and you've just been relying on Gen AI to do it? Yeah, that's vulnerable. I don't have to wait and see what, you know, how it all unfolds. So, looking ahead for like the next five to 10 years, how do you see this author publisher relationship evolving? What is your like you're gazing into the crystal ball? What do you see?

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Josephine: It's such an interesting question because like I said, I believe that on the one hand, because of the speed at which generative AI is evolving and the capabilities are expanding, research can look completely different in five years and probably even earlier. And the same goes for publishing researchers.

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I alluded to this earlier as well. They already have so many choices for how to disseminate their findings. You know, they can already go outside of traditional scholarly publishing and readers as well, readers of our content. They already are starting to consume content in different ways than they were before. For example, you know, through an LLM interface rather than going to like an article page.

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Readers could probably in like, you know, probably already now, but I think it might be common in a few years time that they just have a conversation with the avatar of an author rather than going to like a traditional web page and reading a scholarly article. So, I think what's interesting is that the published article as a means for communication will be completely disrupted. But on the other hand, we have the published article sort of as a token and as a key element of academic achievement and career advancement. So, lots of researchers need to have a certain number of published articles and index journals to reach the next career stage.

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And I think that academia won't evolve at the same pace as generative AI and everything that comes with it. So, I think the need for publication, for career progression won't go away, like definitely not within the next five years. But perhaps what's interesting is that there's not actually humans who will read those outputs directly anymore in 5 to 10 years time, for sure. But yeah, I'm hoping that it means that the author experience will be even more important, telling authors what they're able to get if they come to us as a scholarly publisher where their research ends up. You know, for instance, if it's not just as an article, but if it's, let's say we tag it and then it's used by AI and where all the different places that it might be used, you know, we need to tell them where that is and I think we need to be transparent about it.

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So, the commas and the messaging around all of that will need to be really clear. And yeah, I hope that we can create an author experience where authors come to us because they see us as like a trustworthy option to disseminate their research, where the expectations and guidelines are clear around things like disclosure, originality and copyright, and where there are clear ethical frameworks in place as well around the use of generative AI and kind of dissemination and things like tagging. So, I think that's what the future might look like.

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Sowmya: So, yeah, I think a great opportunity for publishers to bring the trust, keep the trust. Right? And to be that holder of trust as we are looking into the future. So, Josephine, it was wonderful chatting with you and thank you so much for all that information you were able to share with us and I really had a lovely time with this conversation. Thanks once again.

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Josephine: Me too. Thanks so much for having me.

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